Alternate Persona Tip Window - Swapping Personas Requires Fast-Camp / Starting Zone

You can thank Angeliana.

There would be no need to switch AP to loot an item for an AP as they share the inventory with all AP on that toon.

There is no way to spin the "more quickly switch classes" point of the initial persona announcement. It is a catastrophically bad idea to implement the ridiculous restriction. Because this is not only slower than switching to an alt, this is dramatically slower.

1.) Go all the way back to a city/fast camp zone.
2.) Switch personas, which horribly might not even keep you in the same place?
3.) Run all the way back to camp.

Vs.

Camp and log onto the other alt, which may be camped in the zone already.

This isn't just a bad idea, it is a catastrophically terribly bad idea that completely undoes the stated intention in the initial announcement and vastly devalues a core expansion feature. They really need to rethink that. Seriously.

What this SHOULD be:
1.) Wait for out of combat.
2.) Switch personas.
Done.

I'm curious what role the CRC had in all of this. I mean, they're supposed to represent the players, right? Did they go to the devs and were like "Yeah, yeah...this is exactly what the players want!"? What exactly kind of suggestions or feedback were they giving that led Klanderso to start down this path and the rest of the team to try and finish it?

I'd really love to hear someone on the CRC give some idea as to how the discussions on this went, assuming there WERE any discussions. I mean, did APs come about as a result of feedback, or was this just 100% from the devs?

Well part of the role of developers is implementing things that work well that players might not necessarily expect, too. Hopefully in the end this turns out worthwhile.

So I would think of the CRC thing as more keeping in touch with the players and listening to ideas rather than design by committee.

I was going to buy the F&F edition until I saw this ridiculous restriction. Not even buying the standard edition now, no point in it.

Most of the intended purpose could be salvaged if swapping personas also teleported you to the current zone's succor point. This would effectively give every class an out-of-combat succor ability, but that is hardly game breaking.

There seem to be three major use cases people were imagining.

1. Swap personas to fill a different group role

Based on what we know, this seems most in line with what the devs were trying to design. Getting from the current zone's succor point to your group's camp should not be a terrible burden, and certainly much easier than traveling to a starting city/fast camp zone and back.

2. Create a druid/wizard porting persona

This would still be possible. This does not seem like a game breaking addition. I could already do the same thing with a druid/wizard I've leveled on a second account, albeit with a couple of extra ports back and forth if I'm trying to take a whole group somewhere.

It does devalue druid/wizard ports somewhat, especially on TLPs. But from Luclin forward there has been a never ending march toward reducing the amount of time traveling (Nexus, PoK books, Guild Hall portals, anchors, teleport clickies, Origin/Throne of Heroes), and frankly the game has been better for it.

3. Content skips using combinations of class abilities (e.g. stealth + Call of the Heroes)

This is very likely the primary reason for the currently announced restrictions on persona swapping, and it is largely mitigated by a teleport to the zone's succor point.

It is understandable why people want this. But like most "too powerful" abilities, it would have annoying design consequences going forward. In this case we would likely enter an era of content design that involved a significantly increased fraction of mobs that can see through SoS and double invis.

LOL. This isn't fighting the or curing polio.

There is no right side of History here. You make the decision that's right for you, given the information available. For me, that's skipping the expac, and getting it free in 2.5 years (or one year, if next year's expac is to my liking). For you, it's getting it now.

That's a win-win in my book.

edit: Holy crap I guess you can't even type N a z i even when referring to the actual historical group.

I don't follow that line of logic for 3. If the abilities exist already, it's already possible. Do they need to put more see SoS mobs everywhere because of the summoned mage cloak that has SoS?

Introducing a major new feature will change the game, to borrow another's argument just like the Plane of Knowledge did. They don't need to try and put the genie back in the bottle by hobbling the usefulness of it.

C'mon. My crystal ball tells me you will buy LS before that.

Then show my whole quote: "(or one year, if next year's expac is to my liking)".

I fully admit, I'm not the typical EQ player. I'm now in ToV and CoV, doing content (which I do very slowly, since I don't play every day, and rarely for long sessions). I get the new expac every year for three reasons: New max level, new AAs and spells, and the new T1 armor, which is easily bought in the Bazaar. I don't use the content til much later. And (if you saw a post I made somewhere around here in the last couple days) I haven't used any of the new "features" in the last 7 or 8 years.

This expac has less content, and another feature I won't use the way it's implemented (note, I'm not saying it's a BAD implementation, just one I won't use), which is just like last year (I want a guild TS depot, have no use for the personal one). So, how do I let them know I'm not happy about that? Not to buy it.

And since I decided that earlier today, I've already thought of two cool things about that:
1 - with no level increase, and no new AAs, I won't have to spend much time on AAs next year, which means I can spend more time catching up on content I've missed (maxing AP - the other one, LOL!, epics for alts, shawls for alts, other hunters and progressions, etc), and making more progress on the content I'm currently in.
2 - I've been debating subbing a 4th account. By not getting 6xexpacs, I'm saving more than it takes to sub an account for a year, so I will probably go ahead and do that.

Read his post again. That is -not- what he wrote.

Summarizing what he wrote... player leveled a persona and then wants to change personas to level another to keep them at the same level. The player starts the process for changing personas and while doing so, a cleric leaves the group. Now the first player returns to find this out, but the character persona he returned with was not the healer, but rather a persona which was 1 or more levels below his previous persona. Now to keep the group going to fill the cleric roll, the player needs to redo the whole process of swaping personas.

I said that was a dumb example, because the player in this example found it more self important to keep his multitude of personas at the same level instead of continuing with the group and the persona currently.

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I'm not saying the current process is good or bad. But I'm saying trying to put out bad, and unlikely to happen examples isn't going to help the situation.

There is a large difference between having on demand access to SoS, and a lore item with one charge that requires, on average, 12+ cauldron summons (at 30 minute each) to obtain.

The question is whether it will change the game for the better.

Did Plane of Knowledge make the game better? I would argue yes, but many TLP and P99 players would disagree.

Would allowing groups to constantly skip large sections of content make the game better? My answer is no. Though again there are obviously those that disagree.

Importantly, though, it appears the developers do not want that. I agree with the sentiment here that there are very few compelling reasons to use Alternate Personas instead of an alt. My suggestion would preserve what I believe was the intended purpose of the design, while removing most of their undesired consequences.

Your hypothetical situation in which people as a whole make and level rogue personas to bypass content (when there hasn't been any significant content this would be of use for in years anyway that you can't just invis past) is a fringe case that doesn't justify crippling the feature, in my opinion.

Hopefully the devs change their mind, because outright removing the "switch quicker" aspect is monumentally horrible of an idea.

No.

You read it wrong.

There's two different scenarios that I gave about using Personas, and why limited zone swapping is bad.

1) During a grind group, and your current Persona is starting to green out the content and so you want to swap to another Persona while you already have a group.

People aren't going to linearly level up their Personas, where they hit 50,60,...,125 and then start leveling up the next.

2) Healer leaves. You have a Persona to heal, Cleric. Group still breaks because you have to return to a city and travel back to the group.

Limited zone swaps are just bad design.

One thing they should consider is to have "any zone persona swap", but only if the server has the LS expansion unlocked. The TLP servers would be swap limited to cities and fast camp zones until they get to LS. Or just never unlock it on a TLP server. Have TLPs always be limited swap and live servers always be anywhere swap. That might be a way to make everyone happy. I can see why the TLP audience would want a more limited feature since they want a more classic experience. But on the live servers, I don't think it really makes a difference. I think on a live server, the anywhere swap would be a welcome addition and wouldn't really change the character of the server. Certainly it would change how people play, but I think that the vast majority of live players would enjoy that change and consider it an improvement to the game.

Another idea would be to lose all your buffs and give you rez sickness if you swap in a regular zone. Swapping in a city or fast-camp would be fine, but if you swap in a random zone it's like you got rezzed. (I personally don't like this idea, but just throwing things out for brainstorming ideas on how they could handle it.)

No, you wrote it completely different this time. But anyway....

Solve for #1 - /g hey group members, I really like being in this group, but this xp is mostly green to me after my recent level. Can we move to a different camp, or do you mind if I take a few minutes to switch to a lower level persona? If they say no to both, you make a choice, continue to take the bad xp on the current persona or leave to change your persona or group anyway.

It's not like you are going to be in an unknown status for a long stretch. You zone over, fast camp, load new persona into world, send tell to group leader for invite and spend 5 to 10 minutes running back. I'm sure all of us old time players have sat through a group member's afk while the remaining members continued to kill. Many of those afks took longer then 5-10mins too and they still vacuumed up the xp.

Solve for #2 -
A) If your suggesting the group breaks because you can't get the cleric back to the camp safely, then have the group move to a spot to which you can get to safely and then rebreak the camp when your cleric persona returns. That's been done before.
B) If your suggesting the group breaks because they don't want to wait. It's a pretty good chance some of the group members thought it would be a good time to go also. Everyone who plays EQ these days knows its easier to wait 5-10mins then to /ooc LFG and hope to get a quick reply.
C) Either way, its back to some common courtesy like... /g 10 min warning and I gotta log. (if non vital class member can & wants to switch to fill vital group roll, then they have 10minutes to do so).


Solve for #2 - If all of the remaining group members see the group is good and everyone has real life time with intent to play more. There is a good chance they will wait for you to return with a healer instead of folding into the wind. And well, unless it was a real life emergency, the healer should have given a notice... gotta log in 5 mins.

Soo... if I understand the opening bit about stuff shared between personas includes inventory (items). But I don't see anything similar for personal specific for attuned / no drop / no trade type of restrictions. Does current equipped gear change personas too? Soo for example, is raid gear which is all/all able to be worn by multiple personas (provided not restricted by level or class)? If that is true, that would certainly make gearing up personas much much faster then trying to get raid gear for every alt. Not to mention the time saved during loot phases during raids so people don't have to camp and load an alt and get invites.

making it so you have to be in a non combat zone to swap makes it bout 90% useless vs just having a alt that you can switch to.

Yes, you are correct. Personas can use/equip/click/consume no-trade items from inventory/bank. Of course, if other requirements are met (class/race/level etc.)